Project Mala 2018-2019
Summary of the project
"Triggering a more entrepreneurial culture in the Gambia by improving the accessibility to entrepreneurial opportunities for the youth"
The goal of Project Mala is to support the youth in becoming an entrepreneur. The problem The Gambia is facing is that the students want to become entrepreneurs but the knowledge and the necessities for this are missing. Project Mala 2018-2019 aims to support the young by bundling all entrepreneurial opportunities in the GCCI Youth App and by organizing a App Launch Party to give the app a kick-start. Besides this Project Mala will look into the continuation of the entrepreneurship manual of last year’s project team.
Entrepreneurial opportunities
Due to the research that has been done last year we were aware of the fact that there entrepreneurship opportunities in The Gambia. There are different youth empowerment and entrepreneurship organizations who offer training programs or support in the form of funding or equipment. A lot of youngsters are unaware of these possibilities but they it is hard for them to become an entrepreneur without the necessary support. First all the opportunities have to be bundled because this has not been done properly already. After this Project Mala aims to communicate these opportunities to the youth.
Improving accessibility
As mentioned earlier are the students in the Gambia unaware of the entrepreneurial possibilities in their country. Project Mala aims to communicate these opportunities to the youngsters. This will be done through the creation of an app which contains these opportunities. The opportunities will be categorized so the youngsters can easily find where they are looking for. For the promotion of the app an App Launch Party will be organized. Both the youth and the youth empowerment organizations will be invited there so the youth will get informed on the existing opportunities that can be found on the app. After the event they can take the information home and inform their acquaintances on the entrepreneurship opportunities displayed in the app. The app will spread through this word of mouth advertisement. In this way the information will be more accessible for a big population of youngsters.
Objectives
- Further research on a connection between students and training programs from different youth empowerment and entrepreneurship organisations.
- Explore options for a meeting between the different youth empowerment and entrepreneurship organisations in order to create a dialogue about entrepreneurship education in The Gambia.
- Implement both solutions found in objective one and two.
Deliverables
- GCCI YouthApp
This app was established in close cooperation with the Gambian Chamber of Commerce and Industry (GCCI). This app contains all the information needed for the youth concerning entrepreneurship and employment, you can think of possibilities for finance, education and training programs. - GCCI YouthApp Launch Event
In addition to the GCCI YouthApp, we organized the GCCI YouthApp Launch Event to promote the YouthApp and create awareness of the entrepreneurship opportunities among the youth. The event took place on the 16th of January 2019 at the GCCI Head Office.
These deliverables were an implementation of the drafted objectives.
Funding
The funds to organise the Youth App Launch Event was organised through a fund raiser. We opened a fund raiser on internet and within a few days we had sufficient money to organise the event. We would to thank all the people who donated! The reason why we opened up the fundraiser was because the GCCI did not have any budget available for the event because it was not in their original plan. We found it very important to organize this meeting because of the set objectives. The finances were used to provide food during the event and to pay for transport of the youngsters and the youth representatives. It was necessary to pay for the travel costs because the students did not have sufficient funds themselves.